Someday, Every City Will Have ‘Real Housewives’

Congratulations to Andy Cohen, who’s certainly perfected a formula. The Real Housewives of Miami, to debut February 22, seems like the platonic ideal of these shows — noted location, athletes’ wives, a vague and undefined “fashion journalist” in the Kelly Killoren Bensimon mold. Why are promos for this series only now airing? Isn’t it late for today to be the first time you have heard of this show?

Perhaps airing them far in advance would be confusing, given the volume of Housewives franchises — if they’d begun promoting the February show significantly earlier, the promos for Miami would have predated the short run of this winter’s Beverly Hills installment. Also, there’s little need to promote a new series over the long-term: at this point, viewers will either watch a new franchise or won’t — all the elements, despite different production companies’ work on each individual franchise, are soothingly the same.